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THE BIZ
P R O J E C T I O N L I G H T S & S TA G I N G N E W S
Psst, God — You’re On Next
By DanDaley
There is very little difference between what
many churches and commercial theatres
are doing these days.” —Hector La Torre
In a world where it’s harder than ever to be
surprised, don’t be shocked if Live Nation or
AEG Live appears on the marquee of your
neighborhood megachurch. The people who
install their staging systems say it’s increasingly
difficult to distinguish what’s inside them from
any other theatrical venue anymore.
“The typical high school performing arts
center is about a sophisticated as our basic
small-to-mid-level church is now,” says Gary
Zandstra, the house of worship (HOW) specialist
at Parkway Electric in Holland MI, which
installs sound, lighting and projection systems
in dozens of HOWs every year. “The technology
in the larger churches is on a much higher scale
and often is more sophisticated than you might
find in the other performance halls in the area.”
The systems in HOW venues are more complicated
because they need to cover a wider
range of applications. “You’ll go from a rock
band to a 100-voice choir to a single talking
head in the space of one day; in that same day,
the church will hold a conventional worship
service immediately followed by a contemporary
service with bands and much more in the
way of production values.” says Zandstra. “The
staging needs numerous rigging points, multiservice
power. It has to handle a wider array of
performances than the typical 2,000-seat or less
venue will in the course of a month.”
Not surprisingly, the same dynamic that
has made live concert touring a critical revenue
stream for the secular music industry is
also driving staging needs at larger churches,
which are regular stops for increasingly popular
Christian rock, pop and hip-hop artists, who are
also on the road more as CD sales continue to
decline.
“In the end, there is very little difference
between what many churches and commercial
theatres are doing these day,” says Hector
La Torre, owner of HOW-TO Sound Workshops,
which trains church volunteer staffs to operate
entertainment systems. “Even medium-size
churches are producing Christmas and Easter
events packed with special lighting, multiple
large-screen displays, MediaShout programs,
synchronized projection scenes and loads of
music and effects cues… that rival anything a
secular theatre or concert venue is producing.”
Staffing Issues
One major area of difference between secular
and religious performance venues, however,
is in the staffing. It’s a consistent refrain from
systems integrators that they have to program
increasingly complex systems in a manner that
lets them be operated by the volunteer staffers
that most HOWs rely on.
“They…require different levels of operator
acumen and very often quite different needs,”
states Kurt Bevers, director of technical engineering
for Delta AV in Milwaukie, OR. “The simplest
way to integrate all of this is to control the
whole thing from touch panels. This enables us
to keep [access to controls] away from the folks
that shouldn’t be trying to do things out of their
depth, but hand the necessary technology to
the guys who know how to use it.”
Bevers says the strategy that’s emerged
from this is a set of ever-more-sophisticated
control pages in the Creston/AMX-type automation
systems they use. “In about 80 percent
of the churches we do, at least one night a week
requires nothing more than (a simple system),”
he explains. “Without a control system in the
plan, they would have to have an engineer on
site just to get the system up and down and
to make the minor changes that are required.
With a touch-panel controller, we build an entry
screen that lets them choose what type of
event it is; then they move on to the next screen
that gives them the appropriate controls and
nothing else. As you move up the technology
and production ladder, more and more of the
system functions and features become available
as needed for the type of function that is
being presented.”
The reference earlier to AEG and Live Nation
was facetious, but just barely. In fact, more and
more HOWs with significant systems installed
are renting out their performance facilities to
third-party — and very secular — promoters
and event producers. This is in part to help
compensate for an ongoing decline in the donations
that are used to fund all of the church’s
operations. According to a 2009 Christianity
Today International survey, tithes and offerings
comprise 87 percent of the church budget, and
nearly 40 percent of congregations responding
said that current economic conditions have
resulted in a decrease in weekly giving by two
percent or more last year. But, says Gary Zandstra,
it’s also a tactic to introduce more people
in the community to the church itself. “Once
they’ve got you through that door for a concert,
you may be more likely to return on Sunday,” he
says. This also often makes HOW performance
facilities less expensive to rent than competing
conventional venues. However, HOWs do have
to pay taxes on any for-profit uses of the space
in order to maintain their tax-exempt status.
As live performances continue to play a
bigger role in entertainment revenues streams,
HOWs will become bigger factors in the overall
venue and venue systems equation. What’s
holding many of them back, says La Torre, is a
lack of understanding of what venues need in
terms of acoustics and a failure to properly budget
for all of the systems and their installation.
“What they have to realize is that every church
service is, in fact, an AV presentation, and that
there really should not be a great difference between
what a goes on every worship day and
a special presentation. It’s just the scope of the
project that differs,” he says.
Want to know who, what, when, where, why
and HOW? Ask Dan Daley via e-mail at ddaley@
plsn.com.
46 PLSN NOVEMBER 2010